John Cassidy's Blog, page 93

News Flash: Romney Crashes Out of the Olympics

I guess I was wrong yesterday when I counselled Mitt Romney to confine his overseas trip to London and come home before getting into trouble: a better piece of advice would have been for him to skip the U.K. leg as well.

After less than thirty-six hours on the ground, the Mittster is engaged in damage control after three separate slipups: an interview with NBC News in which he appeared to criticize how the Brits have prepared for the Games, adding “It’s hard to know just how well it will turn out”; a suggestion from one of his advisers that our African-American President couldn’t understand the so-called “special relationship” between the U.S. and Britain; and renewed publicity about his wife’s involvement in the aristocratic equine sport of dressage.

After a meeting today with David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, Romney rowed back from his comment to Brian Williams that he had found some aspects of London’s prep work, such as the transport and security arrangements, “disconcerting,” and said he was sure the games would be “highly successful.” The damage had already been done, though. Even Cameron appeared miffed by Romney’s earlier remarks; he issued what sounded suspiciously like a jibe about the American’s leadership role in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games. “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world,” Cameron said. “Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.”

The British press is busy whipping up the controversy and adding some new elements. In today’s issue of the Daily Mail, the self-styled voice of middle England, a headline blared: “Who invited him?” A report on the Guardian’s Web site said that Romney had breached protocol by revealing that he had met with Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, the British intelligence agency, whose activities are kept shrouded in secrecy. The Independent suggested that he had of Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, with whom he also had a meeting. The transcript of a brief press conference that the two gave suggested he had indeed suffered a memory lapse: “Like you, Mr. Leader, I look forward to our conversations this morning,” Romney said with Miliband at his side.

If there were a medal for diplomacy, Romney would already have been eliminated from the competition. “Good old Mitt,” tweeted Paul Harris, an American correspondent for the Guardian. “His charm offensive in the UK failed to be charming, but he really pulled off the offensive bit.” Added a Guardian reader: “Only someone who understands our Anglo-Saxon heritage could piss off the Brits so early into his trip.”

Romney’s troubles started before he left. According to an incendiary story by the Daily Telegraph’s Washington correspondent, Jon Swaine, two of Romney’s foreign policy advisers said that President Obama had adopted a chilly stance towards the U.K., which a Romney Administration would reverse. If the advisers had quit there, it wouldn’t have been much of a scoop. But they didn’t: “We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he”—Romney”—“feels that the special relationship is special,” one of the advisers said. “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

Once the Mittster was safely ensconsed in the White House, his advisers went on, he would restore to the Oval Office a bust of Winston Churchill, which the Obama Administration returned to the British Embassy in 2009. “Obama is a Left-winger,” one of advisers averred. “He doesn’t value the Nato alliance as much, he’s very comfortable with American decline and the traditional alliances don’t mean as much to him. He wouldn’t like singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory.’”

The Telegraph story appeared just as Romney was landing in London. Not only did it violate the tradition that Presidents and Presidential candidates refrain from domestic bickering when they are abroad, it raised the spectre of racism. David Axelrod, who knows a softball over the middle of the plate when he sees one, called the “Anglo-Saxon” comments “stunningly offensive,” and Jennifer Psaki, a White House spokeswoman, said
they “raise a question as to whether Mitt Romney and his team are ready to have serious conversation about a foreign policy.”

Forced onto the defensive, the Romney campaign denied the authenticity of the article. “It’s not true,” spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg told ABC News. “If anyone said that, they weren’t reflecting the views of Gov. Romney or anyone inside the campaign.” Another Romney spokesman, Ryan Williams, said that the report was based on “false quotes.” The Telegraph’s Swaine, though, is sticking by his story.

Perhaps the only thing for Mitt to do now is to disavow the “special relationship,” which hasn’t been so special for many years now, anyway. Or, if he wishes to go in the opposite direction, maybe he could appear on the BBC and bash out Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory.” It probably wouldn’t win him many votes in the U.S. but the Brits, desperate for something to cheer about as the Games begin, might appreciate it.

One thing Romney won’t be doing, evidently, is watching Rafalca, a fifteen-year-old brown mare that his wife co-owns, competing in the dressage competition, which starts next week. “I have to tell you, this is Ann’s sport,” he told Brian Williams. “I’m not even sure which day the sport goes on…. She will get the chance to see it. I will not be watching the event.”

So there you have it: the Mittster’s not interested in a poncy sport like dressage. He’ll be too busy watching the boxing and checking out the chicks in the beach volleyball competition. No, he didn’t exactly say that. But I know it’s true. He’s just a regular American guy, after all, and not the first one to get into a spot of bother on a summer trip abroad.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP Photo.

Mitt Goes Abroad—But Should He Come Home Early?

Mitt Romney might never be President—the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows him trailing Barack Obama by six points—but for the next week or so he gets to play one on television, traipsing around foreign lands like a visiting dignitary. First up is London, where he’ll attend Friday’s opening ceremony of the summer Olympics. After meeting with the British Prime Minister David Cameron and other officials, it’s on to Jerusalem, where he will deliver a speech and meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he worked with briefly at Boston Consulting Group back in the nineteen-seventies. And on the way home, he’ll stop off in Poland for more speechifying and meetings, including one with Lech Walesa.

It’s all designed to make the Mittster look like he belongs in the Oval Office. Inevitably, it will draw comparisons with the eight-country trip that Obama took four years ago to the week, but expecting Romney to match that odyssey is unfair. In 2008, a grateful world, or large parts of it, regarded Obama as the anti-Bush. His overseas journey was more akin to a sold-out tour by the latest rock sensation than a normal political trip. It climaxed in a famous open-air speech near the Brandenburg Gate, where he declared to hundreds of thousands of cheering Germans: “People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time.”

Romney won’t be expecting a reception on that scale, which is just as well. It’s doubtful he could fill a Berlin Bierkeller, let alone one of its grand strasses. Still, the trip will keep him in the news on this side of the Atlantic at a time when most potential voters will be focussing their attention on competitions of a more engaging kind: Michael Phelps versus Ryan Lochte. Jordyn Wieber versus Gabby Douglas, Usain Bolt versus the clock. In London, Romney will get to wave the flag with the U.S. Olympic team, with which he is fortunate enough to have a personal association. A horse co-owned by his wife, Ann, is representing the United States in the equine competitions.

Go Ann!

Not quite. It would be preferable for Team Romney if Ms. Romney’s association with Team U.S.A. was in a sport a bit more proletarian than dressage, which is such a snooty pursuit that Princess Anne, Queen Elizabeth’s only daughter, used to be involved in it. (That was how she met her former husband, Mark Phillips, a noted English equestrian.) Luckily for Mitt, the boys up in Beantown have come up with a neat way to portray the candidate’s wife in more middle-class surroundings. After the festivities in London, they are dispatching her to Porthcawl, a modest seaside resort in Wales, where she will wax lyrical about her Welsh grandfather David Davies, who worked in the local coal mines before emigrating to Michigan.

What better way to counter the suspicion that, behind her bright smile and engaging manner, Ann Romney harbors a sense of privilege—a suspicion heightened by her recent statement, on the subject of her family’s tax returns, that she and Mitt have already “given all you people need to know and understand about our financial situation.” She’s no Marie Antoinette. She’s “just a lovely Welsh girl,” Roddy Evans, a second cousin of Romney’s, told the Guardian, which published a story yesterday about the stop in Porthcawl. “You couldn’t meet a nicer family. Mitt and Ann are incredibly warm and loving. It is a hugely romantic story that this little Welsh family in despair get up and go to America.”

That’s the sort of publicity the Romney campaign is looking for. Perhaps it should shorten Mitt’s trip and send him home after London, leaving his wife and other members of his family to join Michelle Obama in the cheerleading section for Team U.S.A. Once Romney leaves behind the Olympics and starts talking about more serious matters, things are likely to get stickier for him. For all his claims, repeated again yesterday in a speech to a veterans’ group, that President Obama has “compromised our national security interests,” he doesn’t have much to contribute on foreign policy. What he does have to say is mostly empty rhetoric and warmed-over right-wing blather.

In a smart post at the Daily Beast the other day, Peter Beinart pointed out that the very itinerary of Romney’s trip illustrates the emptiness and outdated nature of his approach to foreign affairs: the obligatory trips to the United Kingdom and Israel, the two closest allies of the United States, followed by a stop in the Cold War theatre. Is this 2012, 1988, or 1968? The casual viewer might well wonder.

If Romney wishes to be seen as an international statesman for the twenty-first century, he should surely be visiting Beijing and taking his criticisms of China’s trade policy to the place where the policy is determined. In addition to going to Jerusalem, he should be calling on Egypt, Libya, or Tunisia, and registering his support for the forces of democracy. And as for Europe, somebody running as an economic savior should insist on visiting Berlin, Paris, and Brussels—places where decisions (or non-decisions) are being made that will help determine the fate of the U.S. economy.

Romney, though, seems more interested in raising cash—big campaign donations can be reaped from wealthy Americans living in the U.K. and Israel—and parroting lame attack lines about how Obama has undermined U.S. influence in the world. “I am an unapologetic believer in the greatness of this country,” he said at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention. “I am not ashamed of American power. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known…and I am guided by one overwhelming conviction and passion: this century must be an American Century.”

As mere campaign rhetoric, this Reaganesque bloviating may be relatively harmless. The problem is that Romney has people around him who take it seriously. As Ed Luce, of the Financial Times, pointed out several months ago, his campaign represents a comeback for the neocons and even some paleo-cons, such as John Bolton, the former Bush-administration bruiser, who yesterday endorsed Michelle Bachmann’s call for an investigation into whether government employees, including Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Warmongers like Bolton are still looking for an enemy to replace the Commies and justify the vast defense budget. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Romney sometimes appears to believe he has found one—hence the visit with Walesa, the Cold War hero. But the more Romney sounds like Bolton and his ilk over the next few days, the more damage he will do to his credibility and his campaign. Which makes me rethink my suggestion that he should come home early. In fact, maybe he could add some more stops.

Boston, are you listening?

See the Political Scene for The New Yorker’s full coverage of the campaign season.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

Is America Crazy? Ten Reasons It Might Be

“Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it.”

That was my colleague Adam Gopnik commenting the other day on America’s attitude about gun laws. Having read some of the comments on my own post about President Obama’s failure to pursue more restrictions on the sale of firearms, I can only agree with Adam. When Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Mayor Bloomberg, and Rupert Murdoch are all in favor of something—in this case, tougher gun laws—and there’s still no chance of it being enacted, you can rest assured that forces other than reason and partisan politics are involved.

My only quibble with Adam is his use of the singular form: “a belief.” Are firearms the only subject on which Americans are, let us say, a little batty? I’m not so sure. Having lived here for almost thirty years, and having been a U.S. citizen for the past five, I am greatly attached to this country and admire many aspects of it enormously. But the dogged persistence of certain American shibboleths has always struck me as somewhat curious.

What are these shared convictions? I could go on all day, but here, for argument’s sake, are ten. Not all Americans subscribe to them, of course. In some instances, the true believers may amount to a small but vocal minority. Still, the popular sentiment underlying these statements is so strong that politicians defy it at their peril.

1. Gun laws and gun deaths are unconnected.

2. Private enterprise is good; public enterprise is bad.

3. God created America and gave it a special purpose.

4. Our health-care system is the best there is.

5. The Founding Fathers were saintly figures who established liberty and democracy for everyone.

6. America is the greatest country in the world.

7. Tax rates are too high.

8. America is a peace-loving nation: the reason it gets involved in so many wars is that foreigners keep attacking us.

9. Cheap energy, gasoline especially, is our birthright.

10. Everybody else wishes they were American.

Some of these statements may be true. But truth or falsehood isn’t the point here: it is whether or not certain beliefs are amenable to reason. I don’t think these are, which is what puts them in the category of irrationality, flakiness, nonsense, nuttiness, absurdity, craziness….

Call it what you want, the upshot is the same: a failure to look reality in the eye and deal with it on a sensible, empirical basis. Which, if you think about it, pretty much defines Washington politics over the past twenty or thirty years.

Cartoon by Mike Twohy.

Why Obama Shouldn’t Write James Holmes Out of History

Among the snippets of depressing news from Aurora, Colorado: President Obama, during his visit on Sunday, reportedly agreed to a request from some of the victims families not to mention the name of the alleged shooter, James Holmes, who appeared in court earlier today, his shaggy hair dyed orange.

On a personal level, the attempt to deny Holmes more publicity was perfectly understandable. Who can imagine what suffering and anguish the victims families are going through, or the hatred and anger they must feel toward Holmes? Having mercilessly snuffed out twelve lives, as he is alleged to have done, why shouldn’t he be declared a non-person? Actually, I can think of at least two good reasons.

First, wishing Holmes away won’t do any good. It might well do harm. Arguably, the problem with deranged mass killers isn’t that they get too much publicity; it’s that they get too little. Generally, after a few weeks or months, many people forget their names; after a few years, almost everybody has forgotten them. Both they and their victims fade into obscurity and the gun violence continues.

If you think I’ve got this wrong, try taking this little test. Here is a list of places and dates associated with mass shootings. Can you name the shooters associated with them? Austin, Texas, 1966; Fullerton, California, 1976; San Ysidro, California, 1984; Edmond, Oklahoma, 1986; Killeen, Texas, 1991; Jonesboro, Arkansas, 1998; Littleton, Colorado, 1999; Brookfield, Wisconsin, 2005; Blacksburg, Virginia, 2007; Binghamton, New York, 2009; Tucson, Arizona, 2011.

How did you do? If you correctly named Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, the Jonesboro middle-school shooters, or even Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters, and Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, you did better than me. If you got some of the others, too, you must have been reading up on the history of mass shootings, which, as we all know, is more than ample.

That’s part of the problem. In any other country, Johnson and Golden and Cho would be household names—instantly recognizable symbols of all that’s wrong with the gun laws, the gun lobby, and a political system that fails to confront them. The demonization of crazed shooters can serve a political purpose: personalizing the debate engages the public and enables politicians to face down the gun lobby. In Britain, the name Michael Ryan—he shot sixteen people in 1987—is associated with a ban on semi-automatic weapons. In Canada, the name Marc Lépine—he shot fourteen women in 1989—is tied to gun laws that required gun owners to undergo a thorough background check, register their weapons, and take a course in firearms safety.

Here, then, is the second and most important reason we shouldn’t erase Holmes from the record. As long as his name and his heinous acts live on in the public consciousness, there may be some chance of reform. Admittedly, it’s a slim chance, (my colleague Adam Gopnik is right about that and much else) but that’s better than nothing.

Of course, any push for meaningful restrictions on the gun trade will demand the full and vigorous support of the President. Rather than refusing to say “James Holmes,” Obama would surely be doing the victims’ families, and the rest of us, a much greater service if he seized upon this terrible story and used it to educate Americans about the consequences of statutes that allowed a twenty-four-year-old graduate-school dropout to order, online, some three thousand rounds of ammunition for his Bushmaster AR 15 assault rifle, another three thousand rounds for his handgun, and three hundred and fifty shells for his shotgun. Such an exercise on Obama’s part would befit the word “Presidential.”

It isn’t going to happen, though. On Sunday, while the President was in Colorado, Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, said that the White House won’t be pushing for any new gun laws. On Monday morning, David Axelrod tried to change the news narrative back to Mitt Romney’s problems, banging on about the G.O.P. candidate’s refusal to release records related to the Salt Lake City Olympics. “When it comes to secrecy, Mitt takes the gold!,” Axelrod tweeted.

You might say, Fair enough, this is simply a matter of realpolitik. Obama and many other Democrats decided long ago that the cost of taking on the gun lobby was too high to be justified. For years now, they have avoided the subject whenever they could. Take the federal ban on the type of assault rifle that Holmes used, which expired in 2004. Even during Obama’s first term, when his party had a majority in both houses of Congress, he made no real effort to restore it.

Perhaps that was the right decision politically, although for the life of me I can’t see what it gained the Administration. In 2010, did the Tea Party temper its criticisms of Obama because he had allowed its members to keep their AR-15s and AK-47s? Not that I recall. But in many Democratic circles, not just the Obama campaign, it is still taken as given that engaging with the Republicans on the gun laws is tantamount to committing political suicide.

Surely, though, there are limits to this craven attitude. Yes, politics is a dirty business that calls for dirty compromises—especially when you are a President with low approval ratings running for reëlection against a party that largely bases its appeal on emotional mantras about God, guns, and taxes. But in being silent even about the name of the perpetrator of a massacre of this nature, Obama is going too far. America’s outrageous gun laws demand more than hastily agreed upon gestures of sympathy for the victims of the commerce they support. They demand courage, honesty, and a public reckoning. In this instance, though, the President and his advisers appear to be falling back upon the politics of denial.

Read the New Yorker's full coverage of the Aurora shootings.

Photograph: RJ Sangosti/Denver Post/AP Photo.

Why Won’t Romney Release More Tax Returns?

I’m following Mitt Romney’s example and vacationing in New England this week, but the Sunday-morning talk shows make it to out to Cape Cod, and I couldn’t quite go cold turkey. In addition to much rehashing of Friday’s Bain Capital story, the network gabfests actually generated some news on another front: three well known Republican pundits—Bill Kristol, George Will, and Matthew Dowd—all criticized Mitt Romney for not releasing more of his tax returns.

“He should release the tax returns tomorrow: it’s crazy,” Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You gotta release six, eight, ten years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two.” Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Will, the veteran columnist, agreed, saying, “If something going to come out, get it out in a hurry.” And Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004, said Romney’s refusal to release returns for the years prior to 2010 was a sign of his “arrogance.”

With even prominent Republicans saying that his current stance is unsustainable, the obvious question to ask is: Why is the Mittster being so obstinate? He surely isn’t standing on principle, for what principle would that be? The notion that very rich men running for President shouldn’t have to disclose as much information about their personal finances as less wealthy candidates? The principal that if your father also ran for President, and released twelve years of tax returns, then you can release just two and claim the family average is a respectable seven years?

No. It’s only fair to assume that Mitt is doing what he always does: acting on the basis of a careful cost-benefit analysis. Will’s comments on this were spot on: “The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” he said. “Therefore, [Romney] must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” But what information could the earlier tax returns contain that would be so damaging if it were brought out into the open? Obviously, we are entering the realm of speculation, but Romney has invited it. Here are four possibilities:

1. Extremely high levels of income. According to the tax filings and estimates he released earlier this year, Romney earned about $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million in 2010—most of it from capital gains on investments related to Bain Capital. This is a lot of money, but Romney may well have earned considerably more in earlier years. His ten-year severance agreement with Bain Capital ended in 2009. The terms of it haven’t been revealed, but quite probably it allowed Romney to keep pocketing a substantial portion of the firm’s profits. And the years before 2008 were massively successful ones for Bain and other private-equity firms.

But even if Romney earned fifty million dollars a year in some years, would be that be sufficient reason for him to keep his returns secret? I doubt it. Americans don’t begrudge people a telephone-number income as long as they are perceived to have earned it. And insofar as any private-equity mogul earns the money he makes, Romney earned his. He created Bain Capital and ran it for (at least) fifteen years.

2. More offshore accounts. The Obama campaign has already made much of Romney’s Swiss bank account, his Bermuda-based investment company, and the income he receives from Bain Capital-related trusts that are domiciled in the Cayman Islands. It is perfectly possible that in the years before 2010, Romney and his financial advisers were even more aggressive in their use of overseas investment vehicles and tax shields. Hedge funds and private-equity funds, such as Bain Capital, routinely exploit offshore shell companies, to minimize their tax burdens but also to escape government regulation and oversight.

Here, too, though, I doubt whether this would be sufficient reason to justify not releasing the returns. Thanks to the Obama campaign, Romney’s name is already indubitably linked to offshore accounts. I doubt whether the average American is very shocked. Most people know full well that one of the reasons rich people employ so many fancy accountants and tax lawyers is to shield as much of their income from tax as possible, and that one of the ways they do this is by keeping cash offshore.

3. Politically explosive investments. Over the years, Bain Capital invested in all sorts of companies, including some that specialized in helping to outsource and offshore some of their operations, and one, a medical-waste-disposal company, that helped family-planning clinics to dispose of aborted fetuses. Romney, even after he left, kept much of his money in investment funds managed by the firm.

It is conceivable that Romney’s earlier tax returns reveal that he made a lot of money out of some controversial investments. Again, though, it is difficult to see how this would justify taking more heat on the tax issue. The Obama campaign is already attacking him mercilessly for Bain’s actions in shutting down plants, slashing wages, shifting production offshore, and driving companies into bankruptcy while extracting hefty fees from them. Unless Romney were investing in a Chinese sweatshop company that was taking business from American firms, or helping to finance a chain of for-profit abortion clinics, most of the damage has already been done.

4. A very, very low tax rate. Romney’s filings indicate that his effective federal income-tax rate in 2010 was 13.9 per cent, and his estimated rate for 2011 is 15.4 per cent. Those figures reflect the fifteen-per-cent tax rate on capital gains and dividend income. But it is perfectly possible that in earlier years he paid even lower rates. Since his 2010 and 2011 returns were prepared during an election campaign, it seems likely that his accountants took a conservative approach to deductions and other aspects of his finances. In prior years, they may well have been more aggressive. And maybe at some point Romney suffered some investment losses that enabled him to reduce his tax burden in subsequent years. Obviously, we don’t know. But there may have been a year in which Romney’s federal tax rate was in the single figures, and possibly even close to zero.

This seems pretty unlikely. But, hey, as Matthew Dowd noted, “there’s obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, ‘Have at it.’ ”

See the Political Scene for The New Yorker’s full coverage of the campaign season.

Romney Counterattack Doesn’t Clear Up Bain Mystery

Day two of the great “When did Romney really leave Bain Capital?” caper, and the Mittster was out there defending himself, granting not one or two but five television interviews. With Obama campaign operatives virtually accusing him of committing a felony in misrepresenting his status at Bain Capital after he supposedly left the firm in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, and with the President himself challenging him to come clean, Romney and his advisers evidently decided that drastic action was needed.

Speaking from a location near his vacation home in New Hampshire, Romney repeatedly accused the White House of circulating lies about him, and demanded an apology from the President. “There is no question that his campaign is putting out information that is false and deceptive,” Romney told CNN’s Jim Acosta. “They know it, and they should stop it.” Speaking to Carl Cameron, of Fox News, about the Obama campaign’s suggestion that he misled either the American people or the Securities and Exchange Commission, Romney said “It’s ridiculous, and it’s beneath the dignity of the presidency.” Asked by Jan Crawford of CBS News if he thought the President owed him an apology, Romney responded, “Absolutely. What sort of a president would have a campaign that says something like that about the nominee of another party? This is reckless and absurd on his part.” Speaking of Obama, Romney also said, to Jon Karl of ABC News, “He sure as heck ought to say that he’s sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team.”

Romney’s decision to challenge the president personally will hearten some Republicans, who have questioned why his campaign hasn’t been responding more aggressively to the Obama campaign’s attacks. But for all of Romney’s bluster, and the flashes of genuine anger he displayed, he failed to clear up the mystery of why, well after he had supposedly left Bain Capital, the firm was still filing legal documents that described him as its chairman and chief executive.

Quite conceivably, there is an innocent explanation. Perhaps Romney retained his formal titles until signing a formal severance agreement but didn’t actually do anything, or perhaps a lowly lawyer made a mistake in filling in the forms. (As my colleague James Surowiecki noted in his earlier post on the subject, Fortune magazine reported yesterday that other documents filed by Bain Capital at the time don’t refer to Romney as one of the people who ran the firm’s investments.) But Romney didn’t spell out why the documents say one thing when he is saying another: he merely reasserted that he left Bain in 1999 and had no management role after that date. And he stoked another controversy by saying, once again, that he won’t release any of his personal tax returns beyond those for 2010 and 2011. “Those are the two years that people are going to have, and that’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances,” he said on Fox.

For a politician who treats on-camera head-to-heads like trips to the dentist, this was an emergency root canal procedure rather than some elective bridge work. Earlier in the day, President Obama had escalated the controversy, turning it into a personal showdown between him and Romney. Speaking to the local ABC affiliate in Washington, he said: “Now, my understanding is that Mr. Romney attested to the S.E.C., multiple times, that he was the chairman, C.E.O. and president of Bain Capital, and I think most Americans figure if you are the chairman, C.E.O. and president of a company that you are responsible for what that company does…. It’s pretty clear to me that I’m responsible for folks who are working in the federal government and you know, Harry Truman said the buck stops with you.”

Those were fighting words. For any political candidate, it is one thing when a campaign official on the other team tries to impugn your character or accuses you of deception. Such things are to be expected. But when your rival candidate put his own name to such accusations, you are obliged to respond. And when that rival candidate is the POTUS, you had better respond quickly.

By mid-afternoon, word was circulating via Twitter that Romney had agreed to be questioned by reporters from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox—an unprecedented move on his part. Apart from granting an interview from a Pennsylvania farm to Bob Schieffer of CBS News a few weeks ago, he has largely restricted his interviews to Fox. This time, he agreed to talk to all comers, though he gave them all versions of the same basic line. Here’s a sample of his message, from his exchange with CBS News’s Jan Crawford, who brought up the Harry Truman quote that President Obama had cited:

CRAWFORD: [Y]ou say it’s ridiculous. But why is there this discrepancy? You said you left Bain in 1999, yet Bain is listing you as C.E.O. up until 2002. So why were you listed as C.E.O. until 2002?

ROMNEY: The documents show that there’s a difference between ownership, which is I owned shares in Bain, but I did not manage Bain. I left, as everyone knows, to go out and run the Olympics in February of 1999. I was full time running the Olympics. I had no role whatsoever in the management of Bain after I went off to the Olympics. And that’s been demonstrated by people who work at Bain, by all of the documents, but I still retained an ownership interest, I had the capacity if I were not on leave, if I were actually wanting to run the business, to do so, but I did not. I left. And that’s been demonstrated time and time again.

CRAWFORD: Even if you weren’t making these daily managerial decisions, though, doesn’t the buck stop with you?

ROMNEY: Actually, when you leave an enterprise, when you have other people who are managing the enterprise, who take responsibility for all the investment decisions, who decide who’s going to get hired and fired, who decide compensation decisions, they’re the managers, they’re the people running the business. I left the business and went off to run the Olympics, did that full time and after three years, when the Olympics were over, we arranged my departure officially from a retirement standpoint….

CRAWFORD: You don’t remember a board meeting, you don’t remember talking about whether or not there should be outsourcing jobs overseas? Do you remember any involvement with Bain Capital from 1999 on?

ROMNEY: Jan, I had no involvement with the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999.

He had a similar exchange with Jon Karl:

KARL: So you bear no responsibility for what happened to that company even though those SEC forms list you as chairman and the chief executive officer and the president of the company?

ROMNEY: The ownership shares of the company were ownership shares which I retained, but when I left Bain Capital in February of 1999, I went out to run the Olympics and said good-bye to my colleagues. They took over the business. They organized new funds for instance and pointed out that who managers were. They don’t list me as a manager.

Where the story goes from here is far from clear. Some experts on corporate governance have suggested that Romney’s distinction between management and ownership is a credible one; others have queried it. If I were Romney, I would be pushing my former colleagues at Bain Capital to back up my story in public interviews, not just by releasing anonymous statements. But therein lies the problem for Romney that I wrote about yesterday: the opacity of the private equity industry in general, and of Bain Capital in particular. Rather than providing a detailed explanation, supported by documentation, of Romney’s residual ties to the firm between 1999 and today, Bain has grudgingly dribbled out a bit of information here and there, adding to the suspicion that he is trying to hide something.

In coming out swinging on the networks on Friday evening, Romney did what he had to to: he put the Obama campaign on notice that he’s not going to play the role of a piñata. But he didn’t put the Bain story to bed—not by a long shot.

See the Political Scene for The New Yorker’s full coverage of the campaign season.

Romney Counter Attack Doesn't Clear Up Bain Mystery

Day two of the great “When did Romney really leave Bain Capital?” caper, and the Mittster was out there defending himself, granting not one or two but five television interviews. With Obama campaign operatives virtually accusing him of committing a felony in misrepresenting his status at Bain Capital after he supposedly left the firm in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, and with the President himself challenging him to come clean, Romney and his advisers evidently decided that drastic action was needed.

Speaking from a location near his vacation home in New Hampshire, Romney repeatedly accused the White House of circulating lies about him, and demanded an apology from the President. “There is no question that his campaign is putting out information that is false and deceptive,” Romney told CNN’s Jim Acosta. “They know it, and they should stop it.” Speaking to Carl Cameron, of Fox News, about the Obama campaign’s suggestion that he misled either the American people or the Securities and Exchange Commission, Romney said “It’s ridiculous, and it’s beneath the dignity of the presidency.” Asked by Jan Crawford of CBS News if he thought the President owed him an apology, Romney responded, “Absolutely. What sort of a president would have a campaign that says something like that about the nominee of another party? This is reckless and absurd on his part.” Speaking of Obama, Romney also said, to Jon Karl of ABC News, “He sure as heck ought to say that he’s sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team.”

Romney’s decision to challenge the president personally will hearten some Republicans, who have questioned why his campaign hasn’t been responding more aggressively to the Obama campaign’s attacks. But for all of Romney’s bluster, and the flashes of genuine anger he displayed, he failed to clear up the mystery of why, well after he had supposedly left Bain Capital, the firm was still filing legal documents that described him as its chairman and chief executive.

Quite conceivably, there is an innocent explanation. Perhaps Romney retained his formal titles until signing a formal severance agreement but didn’t actually do anything, or perhaps a lowly lawyer made a mistake in filling in the forms. (As my colleague James Surowiecki noted in his earlier post on the subject, Fortune magazine reported yesterday that other documents filed by Bain Capital at the time don’t refer to Romney as one of the people who ran the firm’s investments.) But Romney didn’t spell out why the documents say one thing when he is saying another: he merely reasserted that he left Bain in 1999 and had no management role after that date. And he stoked another controversy by saying, once again, that he won’t release any of his personal tax returns beyond those for 2010 and 2011. “Those are the two years that people are going to have, and that’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances,” he said on Fox.

For a politician who treats on-camera head-to-heads like trips to the dentist, this was an emergency root canal procedure rather than some elective bridge work. Earlier in the day, President Obama had escalated the controversy, turning it into a personal showdown between him and Romney. Speaking to the local ABC affiliate in Washington, he said: “Now, my understanding is that Mr. Romney attested to the S.E.C., multiple times, that he was the chairman, C.E.O. and president of Bain Capital, and I think most Americans figure if you are the chairman, C.E.O. and president of a company that you are responsible for what that company does…. It’s pretty clear to me that I’m responsible for folks who are working in the federal government and you know, Harry Truman said the buck stops with you.”

Those were fighting words. For any political candidate, it is one thing when a campaign official on the other team tries to impugn your character or accuses you of deception. Such things are to be expected. But when your rival candidate put his own name to such accusations, you are obliged to respond. And when that rival candidate is the POTUS, you had better respond quickly.

By mid-afternoon, word was circulating via Twitter that Romney had agreed to be questioned by reporters from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox—an unprecedented move on his part. Apart from granting an interview from a Pennsylvania farm to Bob Schieffer of CBS News a few weeks ago, he has largely restricted his interviews to Fox. This time, he agreed to talk to all comers, though he gave them all versions of the same basic line. Here’s a sample of his message, from his exchange with CBS News’s Jan Crawford, who brought up the Harry Truman quote that President Obama had cited:

CRAWFORD: [Y]ou say it’s ridiculous. But why is there this discrepancy? You said you left Bain in 1999, yet Bain is listing you as C.E.O. up until 2002. So why were you listed as C.E.O. until 2002?

ROMNEY: The documents show that there’s a difference between ownership, which is I owned shares in Bain, but I did not manage Bain. I left, as everyone knows, to go out and run the Olympics in February of 1999. I was full time running the Olympics. I had no role whatsoever in the management of Bain after I went off to the Olympics. And that’s been demonstrated by people who work at Bain, by all of the documents, but I still retained an ownership interest, I had the capacity if I were not on leave, if I were actually wanting to run the business, to do so, but I did not. I left. And that’s been demonstrated time and time again.

CRAWFORD: Even if you weren’t making these daily managerial decisions, though, doesn’t the buck stop with you?

ROMNEY: Actually, when you leave an enterprise, when you have other people who are managing the enterprise, who take responsibility for all the investment decisions, who decide who’s going to get hired and fired, who decide compensation decisions, they’re the managers, they’re the people running the business. I left the business and went off to run the Olympics, did that full time and after three years, when the Olympics were over, we arranged my departure officially from a retirement standpoint….

CRAWFORD: You don’t remember a board meeting, you don’t remember talking about whether or not there should be outsourcing jobs overseas? Do you remember any involvement with Bain Capital from 1999 on?

ROMNEY: Jan, I had no involvement with the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999.

He had a similar exchange with Jon Karl:

KARL: So you bear no responsibility for what happened to that company even though those SEC forms list you as chairman and the chief executive officer and the president of the company?

ROMNEY: The ownership shares of the company were ownership shares which I retained, but when I left Bain Capital in February of 1999, I went out to run the Olympics and said good-bye to my colleagues. They took over the business. They organized new funds for instance and pointed out that who managers were. They don’t list me as a manager.

Where the story goes from here is far from clear. Some experts on corporate governance have suggested that Romney’s distinction between management and ownership is a credible one; others have queried it. If I were Romney, I would be pushing my former colleagues at Bain Capital to back up my story in public interviews, not just by releasing anonymous statements. But therein lies the problem for Romney that I wrote about yesterday: the opacity of the private equity industry in general, and of Bain Capital in particular. Rather than providing a detailed explanation, supported by documentation, of Romney’s residual ties to the firm between 1999 and today, Bain has grudgingly dribbled out a bit of information here and there, adding to the suspicion that he is trying to hide something.

In coming out swinging on the networks on Friday evening, Romney did what he had to to: he put the Obama campaign on notice that he’s not going to play the role of a piñata. But he didn’t put the Bain story to bed—not by a long shot.

Romney and Bain Capital: The Secrecy is Killing Him

Never give a sucker an even break!

Here I am, infuriating many New Yorker readers by finally saying something complimentary about Mitt Romney—I thought he did pretty well yesterday in his speech to the N.A.A.C.P.—and he goes and falls flat on his face again. Or rather, his hometown paper, the Boston Globe, trips him up, questioning his story about when exactly he left Bain Capital. He says he quit in February, 1999. Two Globe reporters turned up documents that say otherwise. One of them, which Bain Capital filed with the government in 2001, refers to Romney as the “sole stockholder, Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer, and President” of the firm.

Once again, the Romney campaign is on the defensive, fending off hostile questions about what was supposed to be his biggest asset as a candidate: his business career. In view of the furor over Bain Capital’s history of firings and downsizings, the timing of Romney’s departure from the firm isn’t merely a historical curiosity. He insists he wasn’t responsible for any of the actions the firm took after early 1999. If it turns out that he was actually running the business—or helping to run it—for several years after that date, his credibility will be shot. “It’s time for Mitt Romney to come clean so that the American people can make their own judgments about his record and his motivations,” Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, said in response to the Globe story.

Off we go, down a familiar route.

Ever since last winter, when Rick Perry started calling the Mittster a “vulture capitalist,” it was clear that some aspects of his career as a leveraged-buyout specialist could be turned to his disadvantage, and that the Obama campaign and the media would pound on them until election day: the workers Bain Capital fired and the factories it closed down in trying to turn a profit on its investments; the debts it piled on the companies it acquired; the hefty dividends and “management” fees it extracted from them, even as some of them were entering bankruptcy; the ultra-low income-tax rate that Romney and his colleagues enjoyed as a result of the scandalous “carried interest deduction” that afforded to private-equity moguls and hedge-fund managers.

Private equity is basically a racket. It may be a productive racket, although there is controversy about that. Some studies show that firms and plants taken over by firms like Bain Capital see bigger increases in output per worker than comparable companies that remain independent. But those productivity boosts are largely one-off situations produced by downsizing the labor force, firing people, and outsourcing some of the jobs they do. Sustained increases in productivity and innovation are much harder to find, as so is evidence that the rise of private equity has improved the performance of the economy as a whole, rather than just making a few people like Romney very rich.

But that’s not the issue here. What’s killing Romney now is another aspect of the private-equity business, and Bain Capital in particular, which has received rather less attention: its opacity and secretiveness. As a private company, Bain Capital isn’t legally obliged to say much about what it does, but its aversion to public disclosure goes beyond standard norms. Like the Carlyle Group and other big private-equity firms, it deliberately withheld as much information as it could, both to create an aura that would help it attract outside investors and to disguise how much money its partners were making.

The clash between the demands of a Presidential campaign and the private-equity industry’s culture of secrecy was always going to be a problem for Romney. So it has proved. For as long as he and his former firm refuse to shed more light on their activities and finances, investigative reporters and Democratic researchers will continue to dig for nuggets of information that can be portrayed in a negative light.

This latest story appears to fall into that category. It’s not news that, in some of its official filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bain Capital continued to describe Romney as an executive of the firm well after he stopped working there full-time and went to rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics. The Globe’s contribution was to unearth more of these documents, submitted by four different business units associated with Bain.

Romney’s campaign has said that the descriptions of him as a Bain executive were just legal boilerplate, reflecting the fact that it wasn’t until 2002, three years after he stopped working for Bain Capital on a day-to-day basis, that he and the firm reached a severance agreement. Today, Team Romney reiterated that message, and Bain Capital issued a statement saying: “Mitt Romney retired from Bain Capital in February 1999. He has had no involvement in the management or investment activities of Bain Capital, or with any of its portfolio companies, since that time.”

But this statement raises as many questions as it answers. If Romney had “retired” from Bain Capital, why did the firm continue to describe him as its chairman and chief executive? And if he was still the firm’s “sole stockholder,” can he really have been as detached from its activities as he claims? “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say he was technically in charge on paper but he had nothing to do with Bain’s operations,” Robert S. Karmel, a former S.E.C. commissioner who teaches at Brooklyn Law School, told the Globe. “Was he getting paid? He’s the sole stockholder. Are you telling me he owned the company but had no say in its investments?”

On top of everything else, the timing of the Globe story is horrible for Romney. In recent days, he’s been trying to move beyond criticisms of his campaign, some of them from Republicans—both about policy matters (e.g. his lack of a coherent economic plan) and his failure to hit back aggressively to attacks on his record. “If you’re responding, you are losing,” Romney told Fox News yesterday.

Today, Romney is responding.

Photograph by Justine Schiavo/The Boston Globe/Getty Images.

Romney at the N.A.A.C.P.: Booing Wasn’t the Story

If you’ve been anywhere near the Internet, the radio, or cable television today, you already know the shocking news: Mitt Romney got booed at the N.A.A.C.P. annual convention in Houston. By lunchtime, it was the leading story at the Washington Post, Politico, the Los Angeles Times, and many other news sites. I heard it on the radio, and when I got home I rushed to watch a video of the altercation: Had an angry audience tried to stop Romney from speaking? Had people thrown things? Was the Mittster rattled?

No, no, and no.

The real news today wasn’t that Romney encountered some polite heckling, which is what this amounted to. It was that he turned up at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in the first place, and that he delivered a speech in which he sought to portray himself as an ardent supporter of civil rights and economic advancement for minorities. Doubtless, it didn’t win him many converts, but it did demonstrate that he is well aware of the need to shed his image as an out-of-touch rich white doofus whose comfort zone doesn’t extend much beyond La Jolla, California, and Wolfeboro, New Hampshire.

But first, back to the booing. During the nineteen-eighties, I watched left-wing activists being dragged kicking and screaming from public appearances by Margaret Thatcher. Ten years ago, I saw anti-war protestors try to rush the stage when senior Bush Administration officials were appearing. This was nothing like that. It didn’t even rise to the status of the jeering that used to be directed at Carl Pavano or A. J. Burnett as they trudged off the field at Yankee Stadium following another hapless outing.

Actually, Romney received a pretty cordial reception from the crowd at the George R. Brown Convention Center. When he talked about charter schools, and when he said he would “defend traditional marriage,” he was applauded. It wasn’t until about halfway through a twenty-five minute speech that the heckling broke out, and even then it was booing of the loudly spoken variety, rather than full-throated bellowing. It lasted about fifteen seconds, and it came when Romney said that in his efforts to create jobs and balance the budget he would “eliminate expensive non-essential programs like Obamacare.” There were some more scattered boos a bit later on, when Romney criticized Obama’s record on creating jobs and boosting wages, but that was about it. When he finished talking, most members of the audience applauded him. Some stood up to do it.

From start to finish, Romney’s tone was conciliatory. He began by saying he was honored to be there, and that he hoped “to represent all Americans, of every race, creed, or sexual orientation, from the poorest to the richest and everyone in between.” He acknowledged that the Republican Party’s record on racial issues “is not perfect,” and he ended by talking about his father, George Romney, reminding the audience that when Romney, Sr., was governor of Michigan, in the mid-sixties, he marched for civil rights in Detroit, helped write a civil-rights provision into the state’s constitution, and created its first civil-rights commission.

Romney spent most of his time expounding what might be termed Booker T. Washington/Thomas Sowell Republicanism—the notion that regardless of race, “free enterprise is still the greatest force for upward mobility, economic security, and the expansion of the middle class.” He talked about charter schools and his efforts in Massachusetts to improve test scores. When the catcalls began, he didn’t try to talk over the hecklers, as Thatcher would have. He simply stopped talking and smiled until the booing had died down. Then, breaking from his prepared remarks, he cited a Chamber of Commerce survey which found that three quarters of businesses said the health-care legislation made them less likely to hire new workers.

All told, it was a pretty effective speech delivered in a potentially hostile setting. Since many pundits, myself included, have been giving people the impression that this is a Presidential wannabe with the political skills of a manatee, that, in itself, was something of an achievement. But there was something else—something of more lasting significance for the campaign ahead. And that was the nature of Romney’s pitch.

Near the beginning of his speech, he said, “You all know something of my background, and maybe you’ve wondered how any Republican ever becomes governor of Massachusetts in the first place. Well, in a state with eleven per cent Republican registration, you don’t get there by just talking to Republicans. We have to make our case to every voter. We don’t count anybody out, and we sure don’t make a habit of presuming anyone’s support. Support is asked for and earned—and that’s why I’m here today.”

Here was the Romney that many moderate Republicans were hoping to see: a candidate trying to move beyond the G.O.P. base and appeal to Americans who don’t work on Wall Street, gather at shooting ranges, or watch Fox News. Clearly, reaching across social and political lines doesn’t come naturally to the Mittster: he doesn’t have the easy charm and personal magnetism of a Ronald Reagan or a Bill Clinton, and he never will. But today, for once, he looked like a competent politician doing his job. By his recent standards, that represents progress.

Photograph by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.

Romney’s Biggest Tax Problem

The headline from the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll is that the Presidential race is still deadlocked: Obama forty-seven per cent; Romney forty-seven per cent. No real surprises there—a survey carried out just before Christmas by the same pollsters produced exactly the same numbers. In the first few months of this year, as Romney’s rivals in the Republican primary tore into him, Obama opened up a seven point lead. That gap has now been eliminated, and it’s back to the status quo ante.

What is worrying Republicans is that, despite three months of poor economic news, their man hasn’t raced into the lead. The new poll reveals a major reason for this failure: voters are still waiting for Romney to unveil a credible plan to create jobs and restore prosperity. While many of them have lost confidence in Obama’s ability to turn around the economy, Romney still hasn’t given them sufficient reason to believe he could do better.

The voters are right to be skeptical. The only certainty about Romney’s economic plan is that it is opaque and uncertain. He has said he will cut taxes on workers and businesses, but, beyond some non-specific references to eliminating tax deductions for higher-income taxpayers, he hasn’t said how he will pay for them. He has promised to cut federal spending, but he hasn’t said where the axe will fall. He has said that he will strike down financial and environmental regulations, but he hasn’t said which ones. And most glaringly of all, he has pledged to cut the budget deficit in half by the end of his first term, but he hasn’t explained how he will square this with his promise to create jobs.

Romney should be doing better. It isn’t as if Obama has gotten any more popular: his job-approval rating of forty-seven per cent is two points lower than it was at the end of last year—statistically speaking, there is no difference. Almost two-thirds of Americans—sixty-three per cent—still think the country is on the wrong track. For any incumbent, these figures would be deeply disturbing.

There is more. The ABC News/Washington Post poll confirms what countless others have found: in the minds of voters, the most important issue by far is the economy, and a majority of people disapprove of the President’s handling of it. This, you might think, is where Romney could press home his advantage. If the election comes down to a personality contest, with voters choosing on the basis of which candidate understands their problems and is the more likable, Obama wins hands down. But when you are looking for a surgeon, you want somebody with expertise and experience—that, at least, is the Mittster’s pitch.

The only good news for Romney is that, at least according to this poll, voters still trust him more than Obama to handle the economy. But his advantage on this question is a narrow one—just five points—and despite a lot of negative news about jobs, it hasn’t gotten any wider over the past few months.

Why is that? The conventional explanation is that the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s personal finances and his record at Bain Capital have undermined voters’ faith in his abilities as an economic manager. But while some recent polling in swing states provides support for this thesis, the national numbers from the ABC News/Washington Post poll don’t really back it up. Just twenty-four per cent of respondents said Romney’s work “buying and restructuring companies before he went into politics” is a major reason to oppose him. Practically the same number—twenty-three per cent—said Romney’s business record is a major reason to support him. Most respondents were agnostic. Fifty per cent of them said that Romney’s experience in corporate restructuring isn’t a major reason to support or oppose him.

If the G.O.P. candidate’s ties to Bain Capital aren’t holding him back, what is? The poll suggests it is his failure to give a fuller picture of how he will turn around the economy. Asked which candidate has presented a clearer plan for dealing with the economic situation, forty-three per cent of respondents said Obama and just thirty-eight per cent said Romney. The incumbent President, an economic incompetent in Romney’s telling, is scoring higher than him on his plans to fix things.

This finding confirms something Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said a few days ago: with numbers this low on the key issue of the election, “I don’t think you can beat an incumbent President, even if the economy is slow.” Kristol’s comments were sparked by a Fox News poll, which found that just twenty-seven percent of voters believe Romney has a clear plan for improving the economy. Some Republicans were critical of Kristol for breaking ranks at a crucial time, but he was only stating the obvious.

The Romney campaign, of course, claims that it has presented an economic plan—and strictly speaking it is right. Last September, Romney unveiled “,” an economic manifesto that ran to more than a hundred and fifty pages. Even back then, though, Romney’s ragtag collection of proposals—fifty-nine of them, ranging from eliminating the inheritance tax, to capping federal spending at twenty per cent of G.D.P., to opening up America’s energy reserves for development—was widely dismissed as inadequate by his fellow Republicans.

In response to criticisms from his rivals in the G.O.P. primary, Romney subsequently unveiled a revised version of his plan, this one containing a twenty per cent cut in income-tax rates from top to bottom. More recently, in a series of ads, his campaign has said that in his first hundred days he will move to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, and balance the budget. “By day one hundred,” the ads say, “President Romney’s leadership brings new certainty to our economy, and the promise of new banking and high-tech jobs.”

By no stretch of the imagination could the hastily revised tax proposals or the promises contained in the new ads be described as a credible, fully-costed economic plan. The reasons Romney still hasn’t spelled out such a strategy are twofold. For a long time, it seemed like smart politics to avoid issuing specific pledges—such as which government programs he would cut and which tax deductions he would eliminate—that his opponents could pick apart. And from an economic perspective, too, it made some sense to maintain as much flexibility as possible.

The academic economists advising Romney—a group that includes Harvard’s Greg Mankiw and Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard—are moderate conservatives: they don’t believe in right-wing fairy stories about tax cuts being self-financing and budget cuts stimulating the economy. If Romney enters office and slashes tax rates without pushing through offsetting spending cuts, the budget deficit will shoot up—just as it did following the Reagan and Bush tax cuts. If he cuts government spending without stimulating demand in other ways, the unemployment rate will rise even further. In addition, the entire situation is greatly complicated by the so-called “fiscal cliff”: the fact that on January 1, 2013, the Bush tax cuts are due to expire and the automatic spending cuts agreed upon by both sides during last year’s debt-ceiling debacle are due to be introduced.

Rather than trying to navigate these perilous shores, Team Romney settled upon a strategy of studied vagueness, for which it is now paying a political price. With the Obama campaign hammering away at the candidate’s personal finances and his record at Bain Capital, the campaign can’t pivot to his economic plan, because he doesn’t have a proper one—not yet, anyway. Obama, by contrast, can at least point to the American Jobs Act, which he promoted until most of it perished in Congress.

In the coming weeks, the Romney campaign will surely move to address these problems. Shortly before the Convention, I can see him relaunching his economic plan, highlighting some specifics and rebranding it as, say, a ten-point jobs proposal, rather than a fifty-nine-point grab bag. But a lot of damage has already been done. Many Americans, including some on Romney’s own team, regard him as a man without a plan. For a candidate marketing himself as a “Mr. Fix-it,” that is a very bad thing. Possibly, even worse than having a Swiss bank account and investments in the Cayman Islands.

Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.